Gene Healy argues in this Examiner article that we’d be better off if we kept politicians who taught Constitutional Law out of the Oval Office. Three of the four presidents who fit into that category (Wilson, Clinton and Obama, although his claim to have been a con law prof at the University of Chicago is pretty shaky) have done enormous damage to the country through their clever evasions of the Constitution’s limits on executive power. (The fourth, Taft, did little or no harm, constitutionally.)
Those who study what is called “constitutional law” these days devote hardly any time to the Constitution itself, but focus instead on what the Supreme Court has said it means. Sadly, the Court has mostly been engaged in a project of severing the Constitution’s restrictions on governmental power so that statists can have their way with the people’s liberties and property.
